How does that work in fact?
Well, imagine if you can: let us say an unemployed man, sitting on a crumbling porch somewhere in Alabama in his string vest, and a chap comes along and says "Would you like to buy this house before it falls down and won't you let me lend you the money?"
And is this chap who says this, is he a banker?
Oh no, no, no. He's a mortgage salesman. His income depends entirely on the number of mortgages that he can arrange.
So his judgment to arrange mortgages is completely objective.
Completely objective. Yes. Absolutely, yes. Yes.
And what happens next?
Well then this debt, this mortgage, this debt is taken, bought up by a bank and packaged together on Wall Street with a lot of other similar debts.
With out going into much detail about what is actually...
Without going into any detail. No, that's far too boring. And so this is put into a package of debt and then it's moved on to Wall Street and this is, it's extraordinary what happens and somehow, this package of dodgy debts stops being a package of dodgy debts and starts being called a Structured Investment Vehicle.
An SIV?
An SIV, exactly.
Yes I see, and then someone like you comes along and buys it.
Yes, I buy it yes, and I'll ring up somebody in Tokyo and say, "Look, I've got this package, do you want to buy it?" And they'll say, "What's in it?" I'll say, "I haven't the faintest idea." And they say, "How much do you want for it?" and I'll say, "I want $100 million dollars," and then they say, "Fine." That's it. So that's the market.
And presumably this package--that kind of thing can happen several times to the same package.
Quite possibly yes.
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